I HAD NEVER paid particular attention to the fifty-foot-high telephone pole that towered above me at the bottom of our driveway. It was an old pole, full of splits in the wood, and it had two wooden crossbars bolted to the top, with ceramic insulators that held overhead power and telephone lines. I was sixteen and had been climbing for a couple of years, and I had studied books on how to rock climb up cracks similar to those in the telephone pole. I desperately wanted to put my bookknowledge into action, but I couldn’t yet drive to real rock cliffs. So I started looking for things to climb in my neighbourhood, and there was the pole. I decided to climb it.
Just up the driveway from the pole was the house in Seattle that I shared with my parents and four siblings. My father worked as a mechanical engineer for Boeing and my mother managed the household. My parents were devout Catholics, and family activities revolved around their parish church and the Catholic schools we all attended. It was a healthy and loving environment, but I felt hemmed in. I was much more interested in exploring and having adventures in the natural world. I joined a local Boy Scout troop to hike and explore the Cascade Mountains. One of the dads in our troop, a climber, started taking a few of us on trips where we learned basic mountaineering skills. My earliest obsession was Mount Rainier, a peak that dominates the skyline south of Seattle. I reached its top with my Boy Scout group when I was fourteen, in an experience rich with excitement, fear, and wonder.
By the time I noticed the telephone pole, my friends and I had already started teaching ourselves the basics of technical rock climbing. My parents didn’t understand the dangers in what we were doing and, later on, when I’d drive away to go climbing, my mother would call, “Have fun hiking with the ropes!” To them it seemed like a wholesome outdoor activity that I would probably outgrow. So they let me pursue my climbing, so long as it didn’t interfere with Sunday churchgoing. They were more concerned with familiar issues, such as my brothers and sisters driving the family cars and dating—activities they saw as more dangerous, both physically and morally.
Around this time, a UPS truck appeared in our driveway, and the driver unloaded a heavy box addressed to me. I ran to the door so full of excitement I collided with my mother, almost knocking her over. Inside the box was a mound of different sized pitons, the metal spikes used for rock climbing. I signed for my new prized possessions, paid for with money I’d earned doing odd jobs. Now I was equipped for the telephone pole.
My plan was to climb the pole during the day, when my dad was at work and my mom was running errands. One afternoon during summer vacation, that moment arrived. I quickly called Gordy, one of my Rainier climbing partners, to come over and help. We eyed the equipment. Each piton had a thick metal ring—the “eye”—forged at a right angle to a tapered metal blade similar to the business end of a table knife. The blades came in different sizes—thin, medium, and thick. My safety depended on handling these correctly: I knew I had to place the right size piton into a crack and hammer on the end of the eye until it was firmly wedged in the wood.
It was time to go. I started up the pole using direct aid, a technique I had studied in my rock climbing books. This involved reaching as high as I could to hammer in a piton. Then I clipped a short rope ladder to the eye of the piton using a carabiner and clambered up to the highest rung. Perched there, I reached up higher again to place another piton and repeated the process. It worked, and soon I was fifteen feet up the pole.
My climbing books had taught me another important lesson: how not to hit the ground if a piton pulled out of the wood when I weighted it. I accomplished this by tying the end of a climbing rope to my harness, and now, after placing each piton, I clipped the rope into the carabiner attached to it. Gordy stood at the base of the pole and fed the rope through a braking device. If one of the pitons pulled out as I moved up, Gordy would hold the rope firmly to keep it from slipping through the braking device. The rope would then come tight where it ran through the carabiner on the piton below and stop me after I took a short fall.
I tried with each placement to choose a piton whose blade was thicker than its destined crack, but thin enough to be pounded all the way in to where the eye was flush with the outside of the pole. Yet as I got higher, I became afraid that the soft wood might compress on both sides of the crack and the pitons would not be wedged tight enough to hold my weight. One of the safety measures I had read about was to gently step into my rope ladder, once I’d clipped it to the newly placed piton above me, and give it a little bounce. It was less scary and more secure to commit my weight to the new piton placement if it passed this bounce test. As I gained more confidence in my system, I began to enjoy my position high off the ground. Looking down on the familiar neighbourhood that I had never seen from this perspective, I felt free. But how much more liberating would it feel to be on a real rock wall hundreds, maybe thousands, of feet above the ground!
Of course, I’d never done direct aid climbing before, and I was slow. I had planned to finish before my parents came home, but by late afternoon I was only three-quarters of the way up the pole, and there was my dad, home from work in his old brown Studebaker pickup. As he stopped at the bottom of our driveway, a wave of fear swept over me, greater than any anxiety I’d felt in climbing. I’d been discovered, and there would be consequences.
Dad looked up and walked to where I was swinging forty feet above him. “What kind of stupid stunt is this?” he yelled. What could I say? He didn’t know anything about climbing; it was going to be difficult to convince him that I was following all the proper safety techniques practiced by adults on big walls in Yosemite. To him, climbing a wooden pole topped by power lines was stupid and dangerous.
I worked up enough courage to call down, “I’m being very careful! My technique is safe!” My dad shouted back, “I don’t care what you’re doing. Come down immediately!”
I was faced with a dilemma. I didn’t want Gordy to lower me, which really would be dangerous. But my dad expected me to obey his command. We had a common interest in science and technology, so I knew the best way to get him to listen was to provide an engineered solution. And so, perched high on the pole, that’s exactly what I did.
“Dad,” I called down, “it isn’t safe for Gordy to lower me with the rope running through these pitons. The wood’s too soft. If they pull out, I could fall. But I can build a safe anchor if I climb up another ten feet and tie a loop of nylon webbing around that wooden cross-bar bolted to the pole. Then I can feed my rope through the loop and I can rappel safely to the ground.”
My dad calmed down, listened, and understood the merits of my explanation. And he let me finish my climb. What I didn’t tell him was that rappelling would also allow me to retrieve my precious pitons on the way down. I would need them for future climbs on real rock.
I was later punished, but finishing my climb up the pole was worth any penalty. And even more satisfying was my dad’s first-ever acknowledgement that I knew more about something than he did. Through books and now through direct experience, climbing had introduced me to a world where possibilities seemed infinite. This was my secret. There was no going back. At home, when I began to feel out of place, I would look out the window and see my loop of webbing high up on the pole. It became a symbol, there to remind me that adventure and exploration were waiting in the mountains.